Water and Natural Resources Consultant, Author

The Human Right to Water

Jamie Workman, a Yale and Oxford honors graduate, spent years as an award-winning political and business reporter in Washington, DC before being recruited as a Special Assistant to U.S. Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt. Workman focused Clinton Administration communications, policy papers and speeches on wild land fire, endangered species, climate change, forestry, and dam removal. Moving to Africa in 2000, Workman helped a small team write the landmark Report of the World Commission on Dams. He has written and lectured on water and dams in India, Africa, China, Indonesia and the US, from the art of dam removal, to reinvesting hydropower revenues in floodplains or develop cap-and-trade policies to reduce groundwater over-pumping. For years he lived out of a Land Rover in Africa writing about causes and consequences of water scarcity and tracked the desert siege between Botswana and Kalahari Bushmen. Workman has edited Tsodilo Hills: Mountain of the Gods, a scholarly coffee-table book. In early 2009 Bloomsbury/ Walker Press will publish his forthcoming Heart of Dryness: A true story about the end of water. He lives with his wife Vanessa and their daughter Camille in San Francisco.